A teacher of English discusses a recent National Council of Teachers of English Convention, and the supposed-panacea of sentence-combining as a teaching technique. He denies that there are panaceas and concludes that in order to learn reading and writing skills, students must practice reading and writing. (KC)

A controlled study (Ss were 14 reading disabled and 17 control boys, 8 to 12 years old) using the Diagnostic Evaluation of Writing Skills (DEWS) verified its efficacy in identifying students requiring special remedial instruction without recourse to batteries of standardized tests. The DEWS provided a basis for directing remediation into specific…

Suggestions are provided for including writing from personal experience as a part of the school's curriculum. The philosophy is that experience in the real world provides motivation for writing. (KC)

Expository writing, it is suggested, is a skill that a student will employ throughout an undergraduate career and even into professional life. In light of this fact, additional measures are advocated to promote good writing in institutions of higher education. (MLW)

The author suggests that it is vitally important for the teacher of composition to have an articulated philosophy of rhetoric, that a philosophy and a teaching practice are so interrelated that one validates the other. (Author/KC)

Suggests creating subtle but simple controversial issues and personalities for student assignments to help students consider the problem of audience in technical and business writing. (TJ)

Discusses ways to insure that the current emphasis on grammar, concrete structure, and explicit simplicity do not edge out the development of writing that is forceful and engaging. (FL)

Stresses the importance of a background in English in the development of an attorney's communication skills. (HOD)

Class activities such as discussing student work in editing group sessions or on the viewing screen can be used successfully to teach revision and ensure polished student writing. (RL)

Explores the use of detective story writing to help children move from chronology to causality. Examines the elements of a detective mystery and includes a sample story written by a student. (HTH)

Patterns writing instruction after the contemporary quest for weight control: lots of exercises, dedication toward achieving a goal, and developing slowly through carefully planned stages of the whole process. (RL)

Argues that standardized, machine-scored tests do not test writing skills and that the emphasis on such tests has a deleterious effect on the acquisition of writing skills. (IRT)

Outlines an approach to the problem of teaching writing to large classes. The teacher should itemize the types of writing the learners will do. The class is divided into as many groups. The teacher then marks texts, without correcting them. In this manner, a teaching error can be highlighted. (PJM)

Proposes that the difficulty of many developmental/remedial college students is not a specific reading or writing problem but insufficient precollege experience with written discourse. Discusses the impact of reading instruction on writing and of writing instruction on reading. (Author/FL)

Presents examples to substantiate the observation that children experiment with and benefit from writing long before they receive formal instruction, and suggests ways for parents and teachers to avoid obstructing this natural and healthy tendency. (HTH)